Tag Archives: SignSunday

In September 2014 I visited #LasVegas with some friends. We had a couple of nice dinners, saw a great show and visited the Neon Museum. I had been there before in daylight, but since that time they've got some of the old signs restored and lit up. A few of them are displayed in spots around town, but most of them are on the museum grounds.

This panorama was made from five handheld iPhone shots. There were colored lights going on and off during the time I was trying to get my shots, so it took a lot of work to even out the colors and lighting somewhat. There's a bunch of adjustment layers in #PhotoshopCC used to make what corrections were possible.

Who knew such a landmark could also be such an "out of the way" place?

This is a show card from the 1920s on display in one of the catwalks between the towers of Tower Bridge. Amazon sells prints of this for £6.49 (about $10 USD), but I got mine for free by taking the Tower Bridge tour with my camera. After an initial presentation about the history and construction of the bridge, you are able to explore the elevated walkways between the towers from which you get an interesting view of London. It's not not quite equal to the London Eye, The Shard or the top of St. Paul's dome- but still an interesting view. (It's worth it to do at least once, and because I've been to London with three different people on their first trip, I've done it three times!)

I managed to get out of the "studio" (kitchen) this week. Signs are everywhere, and some are interesting . . . or not. The interest here lies probably in the framing by shrubbery. There is some Topaz Adjust in this, then some levels adjustments. The adjusted layer was then duplicated and given a Gaussian blur of 30 pixels and set to overlay mode. A bit of cropping and some burning in of the text on white to minimize reflections and, "Voila!"

In those prehistoric days when the average home had black and white TVs, cable was an exotic feature in remote places and travel was done mostly by car rather than air, motels used this attractive come-on to get you to pull in for the night.

Our tour group passed through a mixed residential and business area of Prague where I spotted this sign. Most Americans don’t know that there is a different Budweiser brand in most of the Eurozone. The conglomerate that currently owns Anheuser-Busch is allowed to market its products as Bud, but not as Budweiser, which is trademarked by a Czech brewery. It’s an interesting David-and-Goliath style history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budweiser_Budvar_Brewery